Look, You are being introduced to all sorts of new terminology in this first week. There will be this "what did I get myself into" feeling for a few days, but that should subside by the week's end. Just sit back and absorb as many of these terms as you can, and it will start to make better sense towards the end of the week. Once you get past all of this sound theory and start coupling a transducer to the material, it will start to come together and you'll see why you had to be subjected to all of the terminology early in the week.
Biggest thing you need to learn this week is how to get a good calibration on the IIW block. What I mean by this is, understand the signal(s) that you see on the screen so that you know where your sound is going and what to expect it to look like when you get that signal showing up on the screen.
Sure the first week is tough, but if you get over whelmed during this first week, take a break and use what you've learned this week and the next week will make a lot more sense, plus the math gets a bit tougher in week #2 when you get into angle beam testing. I took a few months inbetween Level I and Level II classroom instructions and I think it helped me not be so over whelmed with all of the new material being poured into my brain. Level II made so much more sense after I used what I learned in Level I for a little while. I'm still learning about bouncing sound and I have been doing this since Oct of 1999. These new UT machines have so many features now that it takes a while to get through all of these menus and understand what all of that stuff does and how it effects what you see on the screen. Be patient and give yourself some time for all of this new stuff to sink in and makes sense. I was right there where you are now in my first week at UT school, except I was sitting in Krautkramer's UT classroom instead of Hellier's....LOL